Biden ineptly selects Christopher Dodd to help him pick a VP candidate.

It's mind-boggling.

I'm reading "Dodd's Alleged Past Misconduct Shadows Biden's VP Panel" (Real Clear Politics).

Biden has named Dodd to help steer his selection committee for a vice president, raising the question of whether one former senator should answer for his unwanted sexual behavior during [the 1980s] and whether another, the former vice president, made a poor choice in selecting him – especially as past sexual assault allegations now confront Biden in his White House bid....

Dodd... served in Congress for more than three decades. Dodd also had an after-hours reputation. He was considered a playboy at the time, and his less than genteel exploits, helped along by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, led to an infamous neologism. It’s called “a waitress sandwich.”... The two senators were acting, as was their habit, like “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world”....

Beto O'Rourke's hacker name was "Psychedelic Warlord," so that must mean he's done hallucinogenic drugs — right? — and is that something that's okay in a presidential candidate?

Scott Adams addresses the question whether Beto has done hallucinogens:



Scott's first pass at the question is another question: "Have you seen Beto?" He giggles while waiting for the question to soak in. He says anyone who's taken hallucinogens (which Scott has) will have an "easier time" with the question.

Eventually he gives his answer: He'd place a "large bet" on "yes."

He's quick to add that it's not a criticism. "In fact, I might even prefer it." This preference interweaves with his reason for believing Beto has used hallucinogenics (reasons other than that nickname, Psychedelic Warlord): Beto doesn't see barriers. People who have done hallucinogenics "think their barriers are artificial.... They see the world around them as somewhat artificial, meaning that they know it's a construct of their own mind."

Scott's use of the word "know" reveals that (by his own standard) he's used hallucinogenics. He knows the world around him is a construct of his own mind.

"Once you realize that your experience is, to a large extent, a construct of your own mind, then you can start removing barriers. So you can say to yourself, yes, it does seem that, in the normal world, it would be impossible to become President of the United States with my résumé, but I've taken hallucinogens...."

Scott ends this segment reaffirming that he believes Beto has taken hallucinogens. He never gets back to the wafted assertion that it's preferable to have a President who has acquired the knowledge/"knowledge" that barriers are artificial. It makes me think of that well known Robert F. Kennedy quote — and a lot of people think Beto O'Rourke looks like Robert F. Kennedy — "Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?"



That's Teddy Kennedy at RFK's funeral. RFK adopted those words as the theme for the presidential campaign that ended in his death. The words are nearly identical to words that George Bernard Shaw had the serpent say to Eve in the play "Back to Methuselah": "You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"

And there's your forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge — LSD.



I remembered that I'd already written about the RFK quote and Shaw and the serpent, but it blew my mind to search my archive and discover that I wrote about it at the end of a riff that began with a snippet from Scott Adams. Adams had been talking about the weird propaganda video President Trump sent to Kim Jong-Un. I leapt to the RFK quote after I'd riffed my way to: "[M]aybe the target isn't Kim at all but the American media, and they are being lured into mocking and disparaging Trump, which will ultimately help Trump, as the American people will watch the video and be taken by the optimism the elites find appalling."

Leapt, over the barrier.

Is it funny that Trump's dream of things that never were is of a barrier — his wall? Is it evidence of having taken hallucinogens that you see no barrier to... a barrier?

Here's the clip from Colbert's talk show last night, where Gillibrand announced that she was forming an exploratory committee.

TONIGHT: @SenGillibrand stops by @colbertlateshow to announce that she is forming an exploratory committee to run for President of the United States! #LSSC pic.twitter.com/vPUpF1gs8z

— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) January 15, 2019

Colbert asked her the classic question (the one Ted Kennedy famously flubbed), "Why do you want to be President of the United States?" The question was, it appears rather obviously, planned, and even if it wasn't, it was utterly predictable. Ever since Ted's screw-up, presidential candidates have known they must nail this question.

Here's what she said:

Well, I'm going to run for President of the United States, because as a young mom, I'm going to fight for other people's kids as hard as I would fight for my own...

As a young mom? She's 52.

... which is why I believe that health care should be a right, not a privilege [audience cheers], it's why I believe we should have better public schools for our kids because it shouldn't matter what block you grow up on, and I believe that anybody who wants to work hard enough should be able to get whatever job training they need to earn their way into the middle class, but you are never going to accomplish any of these things if you don't take on the system of power that make all of that impossible...

There's an unnatural break between "take" and "on" that makes me think this answer was scripted and memorized and is now coming out robotically. And then there's the grammatical error "the system of power that make all of that impossible." How does a mistake like that happen? I'm just going to guess that she got the idea, as she rambled along, that "things" was the subject. It can't be, of course, because "things" referred to the accomplishments that she wants to have, not what is making them impossible to reach.

... which is taking on institutional racism, it's taking on the corruption and greed in Washington, taking on the special interests that write legislation in the dead of night, and I know [chokes up] that I have the compassion [holds up finger], the courage, and the fearless determination to get that done.

I'm not terribly hopeful that KEG will be able to reach people with that kind of rhetoric. She seems both over-prepped and under-prepped. I'd like to feel that the words a candidate speaks are really coming from their brain as they speak. But if you're going to deliver scripted remarks, have some well-shaped sentences, a memorable phrase or two, and get to the point and stop.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ralph L said:

Did she grope Colbert's hands at the beginning, or was that faked for the camera?

I noticed that she did presume she could swoop down on his hand with her 2 hands, without asking for permission.



Or do you want to say his hand was right there, asking for it?

"[Beto O'Rourke] had Joe Kennedy down here campaigning with him. And Joe Kennedy was driving him around. I have to admit, it may be the first time in history anyone's ever asked a Kennedy to drive."

Ted Cruz makes a Mary Jo Kopechne joke, quoted in "Kennedyesque? Texans get close-up comparison as Beto O'Rourke stumps with Joe Kennedy III" (Dallas Morning News).

In Corpus, O'Rourke began by asking Kennedy to play chauffeur and as he often does, letting viewers come along for the ride via Facebook Live. They bantered. O'Rourke teased Kennedy for being unable to figure out the windshield wipers as a brief downpour hit....

Asked in McAllen about Cruz's jab, Kennedy said... "My family — I'm proud of the contribution that they have made to this country and the sacrifice that they have made to this country.... My uncle fought his entire life to try make sure that everybody got access to health care...

Everybody?  Everybody except that one person.

... because of the challenges that he saw with his own son almost losing his life to cancer as a boy. And you have a senator [Cruz] that shut down the federal government to try to deny millions of people access to health care. Texas obviously has a choice to make."

IN THE COMMENTS: wendybar said:

Well, Beto is like Ted Kennedy. He drove drunk got in an accident and left the scene. He really COULD be the next Kennedy.

Maybe you want to talk about the "drool" flowing from the corners of Joe Kennedy's mouth as he delivered the Democratic response to Trump's SOTU.

I'd like to know who thought it was a good idea to pose a Kennedy in front of a car in a place called Fall River?



I know it's a vocational high school where the students work on cars, but the hood up on a car is a roadside signal of distress, and the words "fall" and "river" had us thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne.

As for the "drool," I think it's obvious that Kennedy overlubricated his mouth, perhaps out of fear that he'd make the devastating Rubio mistake and experience an overwhelming need for water as he gave the response to the SOTU. To me the "drool" is a symbol for what's bad about partisan politics. One party has its problem — too dry!! — and then the other party comes in and instead of correcting to a moderate position goes too far the other way — too wet!!!

And speaking of too wet... if you drive your car badly in Fall River and fall in the river, you'll get too wet and you might drown. And no matter how much the Democratic Party thinks we might love another Kennedy — another Clinton not good enough for you? we got another Kennedy! — the Kennedy brand is badly tainted by Chappaquiddick. And Chappaquiddick is due for further examination in this time of #MeToo and The Reckoning. Let's go through all of the story of the Kennedy dynasty from the point of view of enlightened women today.

Democratic Party, you need to process your Kennedy material into the present day, where we do not accept the subordination of women anymore. And when you're done with all that, you can roll out your new Kennedy. The Kennedy brand, right now, is a broken down car with its hood open, signaling distress.

ADDED: The first time the NYT ever noticed this blog was on October 13, 2004, when I was liveblogging the presidential debate:

"Just after 10 p.m., the Democratic Web blogger Ann Althouse wrote . . . : 'A glob of foam forms on the right side of [George Bush's] mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote.' "

I was all:

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him? Maybe Rutenberg is assuming that these bloggers are all so partisan that if they say one thing against a candidate, they must say everything against that candidate.

Why Jeffrey Toobin is wrong about "How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee."

Toobin purports to know the trick: acting fast. He extracts that special secret from the story of how the Supreme Court defeated Robert Bork in 1987. As soon as President Reagan announced his pick, Teddy Kennedy scampered up to the Senate podium and delivered a diatribe:

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government.”

But was it Kennedy's speed that doomed Bork or the fact that the Democrats had a majority in the Senate? More importantly, Bork's opponents in the Senate Judiciary Committee — led by Joe Biden — outsmarted him politically. As Richard Ben Cramer put it in his great book "What It Takes":

Bork kept talking about originalist jurisprudence, neutral principles of Constitutional Reasoning, the bankruptcy of the theory of penumbral emanations... while Biden talked about cops in our bedrooms!

It wasn't the speed of Kennedy's initial attack as much as it was the slow dance of luring Bork into talking too much, revealing too much. He said he wanted to be on the Court because he's the kind of guy who views it as "an intellectual feast." The borking of Bork taught a lesson that I have seen reflected in the committee testimony of every Supreme Court nominee who has followed him. They never say too much, never reveal specific opinions about issues that will come before the Court, and always speak in terms of their dutiful adherence to precedent.

It just can't play out the same way again. And quite aside from the smartening up of the nominees to the game of their Senate antagonists and the lack of a Democratic majority in the Senate this time, the people have smartened up to politics. A fear-mongering speech like Kennedy's would not be received the same way today — even if there were a handsome Senator willing to say that kind of thing. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Democrats tried to scare Americans with material like that. It was a key — perhaps the key — reason to vote against Trump, and it happened with that empty Supreme Court seat making the threat as real as possible. And people voted for Trump anyway. Either we — those of us who voted for Trump* — did not believe the scary predictions were true or we — the Trump voters among us — actually want a seriously conservative Justice to take that seat.

And one more thing is very different from 1987. Mainstream media has lost its monopoly, and we bloggers and tweeters stand ready to call bullshit on hysteria and overstatement and one-sided presentation of the issues. Speaking of speed — Toobin's big idea for a powerful trick — bloggers and tweeters are oh-so-quick and if we'd been thrown a slab of meat like Kennedy's "Robert Bork’s America" — speaking of "an intellectual feast" — we would have gorged ourselves.

Now, to be fair to Toobin, he does also talk about something else, something recent, that happened quickly and that had to do with preventing a President's nominee from getting confirmed. When Antonin Scalia died, the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, immediately said the Senate would hold the opening for the next President to fill. That was not an attack on a specific nominee. Obama only named Merrick Garland a month later. There was never an attack on the man. It was always a pristine procedural point — love it or hate it. I've already mentioned Joe Biden in this post, and I'm about to say "Biden" again. Toobin never speaks the name. The procedural point is called "The Biden Rule." It was articulated by Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, back in 1992.

The quickness of the invocation of the Biden rule had some importance, because it isolated the principle from the name of any particular person. We lived through a presidential campaign with the understanding that the winner would make the nomination. How could quick action against the person — in the Kennedy vs. Bork style — work? We all expect Democrats to denounce whichever person Trump names. A pompous, inflamed speech will either be ignored — as more of the blah blah blah we're so used to now — or it will be picked apart and mocked in social media.

I understand that Toobin has to write these essays for The New Yorker, and I assume he has readers who lap this stuff up, but I consider it deliberately obtuse if not perfectly silly.

_______________________

* That is not meant to imply that I voted for Trump. I have not revealed my vote.

"If they wanted to, the delegates could deploy a 'nuclear option' on Trump and vote to unbind themselves on the first ballot..."

"... a strategy Ted Kennedy unsuccessfully pursued against Jimmy Carter in 1980," observes Nate Silver.

Although I’d place fairly long odds against this thermonuclear tactic, there’s also the possibility of piecemeal skirmishes for delegates. In South Carolina, for instance, delegates might unbind themselves on the pretext that Trump withdrew his pledge to support the Republican nominee. Remember those chaotic Nevada caucuses that Trump won? They could be the subject of a credentials challenge. There could also be disputes over the disposition of delegates from Marco Rubio and other candidates who have dropped out of the race. A final possibility is “faithless delegates,” where individual delegates simply decline to vote for Trump despite being bound to do so by party rules. It’s not clear whether this is allowed under Republican rules, but it’s also not clear what the enforcement mechanism would be.

By convention time, we'll know what the margin is. If Trump has the majority, 1,237, or a bit more, there is still a game to be played. If he has only 1,237, the majority is lost if just one of those delegates flips, for any of a range of technical or political reasons. Trump has to keep wrangling his delegates, and how will he do that among these "mostly dyed-in-the-wool Republican regulars and insiders"?

Trump has a lot of pride in his knowledge of how things work in the real world — how China is "killing us" in these trade deals, etc. etc. — other politicians are naive and he's the one man who can bring expertise in handling wily people who are trying to take advantage. But the real world of this delegate game has brought him up short. It must really hurt his pride, privately, and it hurts his image publicly.

Remember how, in his meeting with the RNC about the wrangling of the delegates, "Mr. Trump turned to his aides and suggested that they had not been doing what they needed to do." That's a nightmare for him. He suddenly sees the dimension of the game he's been so proud of playing so well, and he's ill-equipped to enlarge the operation into something that can work in the coming phase. I'm picturing him losing heart, losing steam. He got so inflated about the polls and how much he'd been winning. And now he sees he's only winning in Part 1, and he didn't even understand Part 2. He doesn't have a team that could play Part 2.

Trump is going to have to rely entirely on a direct appeal to the people. He'll argue that it's outrageous and undemocratic to deny him the nomination. But the decision will be made at a convention where there's a vote — that's democracy too — of a set of delegates. And a majority of them are going to be opposed to him — even if a majority are pledged to him.

"The 2015 Black List, a collection of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays, was announced Monday..."

"Bubbles, by Isaac Adamson, topped the list with 44 votes. It centers on a baby chimp that’s adopted by Michael Jackson."

Narrating his own story, Bubbles the Chimp details his life within The King of Pop’s inner circle through the scandals that later rocked Jackson’s life and eventually led to Bubbles’ release.

ALSO: "Reagan" —

When Ronald Reagan falls into dementia at the start of his second term, an ambitious intern is tasked with convincing the commander in chief that he is an actor playing the president in a movie.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

Speaking of killing people with stupidity, I might be willing to pay money to see: "CHAPPAQUIDDICK... A historically factual look at what really happened when Ted Kennedy drove off the road into a Martha’s Vineyard bay with Mary Jo Kopechne in the car."

But look! Here 's news that the director of "Fifty Shades of Grey" is "in talks to direct" "Chappaquiddick"!

Mark Ciardi is producing the project... "I’ve done a lot of true life stories, many sports stories, but this one had a deep impact on this country.... Everyone has an idea of what happened on Chappaquiddick and this strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way. You’ll see what he had to go through."

"Republican strategists have long theorized about the possibility of the brokered convention, which hasn't happened in decades..."

"... but the dinner meeting [of top Republican Party officials] appears to be the first active planning taken by the GOP to prepare for it," CNN reports.

A brokered convention occurs when no candidate gets enough of the delegates to secure the nomination on the first vote tally. After that, delegates can be given up to other candidates, shifting the balance.... 

[A] new Republican National Committee rule that requires any GOP nominee win a majority of delegates from eight different states....

It had "nothing, zero, nada to do with Trump except he may be one of the candidates standing at the end," said the source. "It was not aimed at anyone."

Sean Spicer, RNC chief strategist and communications director, downplayed the significance of the dinner on Friday. "It was a dinner where the subject was how the delegate selection process works.... At the end of that dinner, there were a lot of questions asked.... It's great cocktail conversation... This is really, to be honest, with you quite silly."

(Strange comma placement in that last sentence.)

Do you know "Who were the last two presidential nominees lacking a majority at the end of the first roll call at their party conventions?" The reason that question asks for two is that it happened in the same year. It was longer ago than 1976, but in 1976, Ronald Reagan got pretty close to getting a brokered convention. (Give up? It was 1952.)

[N]omination by way of a contested convention was a respectable strategy from the 1830s, when conventions became the standard way of nominating candidates, until at least the 1960s. Democratic front runners Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and John Kennedy in 1960 knew that their support might dissipate unless they won quickly. Their chief rivals, Al Smith and Lyndon Johnson respectively, hoped that it would. In both cases effective floor managers kept wavering delegates in line. Kennedy won on the first ballot but not until the alphabetical roll call reached Wyoming; Roosevelt won on the fourth when the Democrats still required a two-thirds majority....

[C]onventions were, are, and probably should be about more than nominations. Senator Richard Russell, the genteel face of racial segregation, accumulated large numbers of delegates at the 1948 and 1952 Democratic conventions in order to demonstrate the power of the white South. Jesse Jackson used the same tactic on behalf of racial equality and a "rainbow coalition" in 1984 and 1988. Whether or not Senator Edward Kennedy actually thought he could shake loose Jimmy Carter's delegates at an "open convention" in 1980, he wanted to make a vivid case for liberalism....

No one can predict whether or not the Republicans will have a contested convention this year, either because Mitt Romney's more conservative rivals might have a chance in combination to deny him the nomination or because they want to make a vivid ideological statement... 

That was, obviously, written in 2012. The odd thing this year is that GOP insiders seem to be looking at a convention where the dominant candidate would be challenged by insurgents making a "vivid case" for... moderation.

"Ah, the wisdom of ages! How arrogant it would be to think we knew more than the Aztecs..."

"... we who don’t even know how to cut a person’s heart out of his chest while’s he still alive, a maneuver they were experts at."

Said Judge Posner, in a piece titled "The chief justice’s dissent is heartless."



ADDED: Perhaps the heart should be ripped out. Maybe we like our judges heartless. But "heart" has been a big theme in judging judges.

At the John Roberts confirmation hearing, Senator Teddy Kennedy probed him about heart:

KENNEDY: [Y]ou were enormously complimentary about Earl Warren, about him understanding not only the law, but also understanding the importance of a chief justice, bringing other justices together in a very important way in terms of dealing with a societal issue and a question. And I think we're a fairer country and a fairer land because of this.This was really the bringing together of the mind and the heart. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "It's dangerous to think about legal issues can be worked out like mathematics."

And another nominee who was here not too long ago [Stephen Breyer] had this to say about the head and the heart: "What you worry about is someone trying to decide an individual case without thinking out the effect of that decision on a lot of cases. That is why I always think law requires both a heart and a head. If you do not have a heart, it becomes a sterile set of rules removed from human problems and it will not help. if you do not have a head, there is the risk that in trying to decide a particular person's problem in a case, that may look fine for that person, but you cause trouble for a lot of other people, making their lives yet worse."

How did Roberts respond?

I recognize as a judge and I recognized as a lawyer that these cases have impact on real people and real lives.  I always insisted when I was a lawyer about getting out into the field and seeing. If I was arguing a case involving native villages in Alaska, I went to the villages. If I was arguing a case about an assembly line, I went to the assembly line. You had to see where the case was going to have its impact and what it's impression was going to be on people. Now, none of those cases were as important as Brown v. Board of Education but the basic principle is the same: I think judge's do have to appreciate that they're dealing with real people with real cases.I think judges do have to appreciate that they're dealing with real people with real cases. We, obviously, deal with documents and texts, the Constitution, the statutes, the legislative history, and that's where the legal decisions are made. But judges never lose sight or should never lose sight of the fact that their decisions affect real people with real lives, and I appreciate that.

Voting against Roberts, Senator Barack Obama said:

[W]hile adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95 percent of the cases that come before a court, so that both a Scalia and a Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of the cases — what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult.... [I]n those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.

After Obama became President and got to choose his own Justice, his nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, disentangled herself from that heart business: 

The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so it's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.... What judges consider is what the law says.

Obama had chosen Sotomayor after doubling down on this idea of heart, saying:

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges.

When he said that, I blogged:

[W]e know what this "heart" business means! It means that the President (or would-be President) understands that judging won't be neutral, that the human being doing the judging, no matter how dutiful and honest he tries to be, can only find his way to a decision in a complex case by responding to the pull of emotion. So "heart" matters. The question isn't whether "heart" counts. It's: which "heart" do you want?

And I remember way back in 2005, when President George W. Bush was struggling to convince us that Harriet Miers belonged on the Supreme Court. "I know her; I know her heart" he said, and I blogged:

I razzed the Democrats for all the "heart" talk at the Roberts confirmation hearings, and the word makes me suspicious. Bush knows hearts (and he can look into a man's eye and see his soul). One wonders if his father believed he knew David Souter's heart...

This reminds me. I once conceived of a superhero I called Framerman:

Framerman appears upon the legal scene whenever judges have difficulty interpreting the Constitution. His superpower is the possession in a single mind of the collective consciousness of all the framers and ratifiers. He stands ready to answer any question, however unforeseen at the time of ratification, precisely as the entire body of relevant decisionmakers at the time would have resolved it. No more guesswork! No more result-oriented historical mumbo-jumbo! Dramatic conflict heightens as Framerman gives answers that surprise and then outrage the judges. The judges could rise up in anger and murder our poor superhero in the end, but this seems out of judicial character. Instead, what happens is this: the judges begin to write opinions rejecting the controlling effect of original intent. Hearing this, Framerman — bearing a slight resemblance to Tinkerbell, who would die if people stopped believing in fairies — clutches at his heart and succumbs.

Well, so, even Framerman had a heart!

"If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself..."

"... then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I enjoyed a story more."

Is Jonah Goldberg enjoying himself too much?

Robert Bork has died.

He was 85.

From the above-linked NYT obituary:

Judge Bork, a bear of a man with a scraggly red beard and untamed frizz on a balding pate who liked to eat, drink and smoke for much of his adult life, handled himself poorly in front of the [Senate Judiciary] committee and failed to give doubters confidence. As Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, wrote of his testimony: “He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country.”

See that's what I was just talking about: Liberals used to express abhorrence of law-and-order types.

The NYT obit refers to "the notion that the nominee was somehow unfeeling as a judge." Somehow... a notion... Where, oh, where could it come from?!

This [notion] was amplified when, asked by a sympathetic senator, Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, why he wanted to serve on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork replied that it would be “an intellectual feast.”

And that was it, the worst answer ever given to any question in the history of the United States. Intellectual feast! The feast turned out to be a feeding frenzy for the liberal media. Why, they're still picking kinky reddish beard hairs out of their back molars! Burrrrp! Tasty! What a time! And no Supreme Court nominee has said one interesting thing since. Every single one has promised to be a good little judge who would never ever do anything but serve humbly and modestly deciding the cases according to the law.

You think it was interesting that John Roberts said he saw himself as an umpire, calling balls and strikes? That proves my point! I know, Clarence Thomas, "high-tech lynching," but that wasn't about doing the judicial work, so I'm excluding that from the point, which is that they all learned what not to do from Bork. Presidents learned to avoid even picking someone Borkish, so no one was allowed to look weird, speak quirkly, seem like an intellectual with ideas of his own, it would just be bland blandness served atop a steaming pile of blandness. That is: Not tasty! As a live-blogger of nomination hearings, I want to know: Where's my intellectual feast?

ADDED: When C-SPAN put its entire archive up on-line, the first thing I looked up to relive was the Bork hearings:

Live-blogging Day 1 of the Democratic Convention.

4:58 CT: Just setting up a post, to be added to over the course of the evening. Please join the conversation.

6:53 (I'm beginning with recorded material from about 2 hours ago. I'll be catching up.): "Being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare. It's patriotism," says Newark Mayer Cory Booker. He gets a huge ovation that turns into a "U.S.A." chant. They're "U.S.A."ing at the idea of patriotism, presumably. Not taxes. Oh, but paying taxes = patriotism. Or, specifically, being asked to pay is patriotism. Who is the patriot in that grammatical construction? I think it's the folks who are asking other people to pay.

7:11 (Still catching up.): Gov. Bev Perdue sounded hoarse and a bit sick as she vowed to deliver North Carolina to the Democrats. A film about health care. A young man whose parents died in a way that supposedly might have been avoided if we'd had Obamacare. They were both scientists, he says, so I'm not clear why they did not have health insurance.

7:19: The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Congress, Charles Gonzales, uses the motto "e pluribus unum" — out of many, one — to mean that all the people become one, instead of the idea that the states were brought together into one nation. The idea that the people merged into a single entity — that sounds like fascism to me. Oddly, as it repurposes the old motto, it expresses the old fashioned idea of the melting pot.

7:30: White males of the gubernatorial kind — Quinn & Kaine.

7:32: A black speaker wedged in — the mayor of Charlotte — before the next pale male. But it's a big one, so I'll go light on the fast-forwarding I'm using to try to catch up to live. It's Harry Reid.

7:36: Reid wants us to fear the Tea Party. They are "extremists and ideologues who leave no room for reason," and they're taking over the Republican Party.

7:42: Nancy Pelosi is introduced along with all the Democratic women of the House. There's disco music playing. The hell? Then I detect that it's "I'm Every Woman." Again with this creepy merging of individuals into the whole.

Did you hear about President JFK and the 19-year-old? They took lots of baths where they played with rubber duckies.

Mimi Alford tells her tale, and she didn't call it rape, even though some of her friends prompted her with that word. She says that even at the point when the President overwhelmed her and took her virginity on Jackie's bed, she felt "the thrill of being desired." After that first encounter he was "attentive.. gentlemanly ... [and sometimes] seductive." Their "sexual relationship was varied and fun, and we spent an inordinate amount of time taking baths together, turning his elegant bathroom into our own mini-spa."

The only discordant note was the yellow rubber ducks, which a friend had sent him. Every time the President saw those ducks, he’d become irresistibly playful.

We named them after his family members, made up stories about them, and often set them racing from one end of the tub to other. It was part of his charm that he was a serious, sophisticated man with extraordinary responsibilities, yet willing to be completely silly.

Sounds like they had a fine time together. She was sleeping over all night when Jackie was out of town:

I was so pleased with myself at being chosen by the President that I didn’t feel self-conscious at all about wearing the same clothes at work two days in a row.

If my office mates noticed, I didn’t care. I felt invulnerable, as if I were cloaked with the President’s power.

What a trip. A power trip. Too bad for those other women (and men) who were not chosen. Did Alford wait until these inconvenient women passed away to preen about her powerful chosen-one status?

It shames me to admit that I don’t recall feeling any guilt. In my 19-year-old mind, I wasn’t invading the Kennedys’ marriage; I was merely occupying the President’s time when his wife was away. If he wasn’t troubled, why should I be? It was hardly by chance that in the 18 months I knew him, I never once met his wife.

Isn't it funny that the "19-year-old mind" came up with exactly the same set of trite justifications that almost every lover of a married man/woman comes up with if they don't want to admit they know it's wrong?

As the summer wore on, I was pulled deeper into his personal orbit. But despite the increasing level of familiarity between us, I never rose above being the obedient partner in our relationship.

Even in our most intimate moments, I called him Mr President. To do otherwise would have seemed inappropriate.

Inappropriate... and way less sexy. And speaking of obedience, there's the dirtiest story, the one where she gives a blow job to Dave Powers, the President’s special assistant after JFK whispers to her "Mr Powers looks a little tense — would you take care of it?"

I don’t think the President thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did.... Perhaps I was carried away by a spirit of playfulness.

Later, she realized it was sordid, and JFK apologized, but nevertheless tried it again, asking her to "take care of my baby brother" — that is, Teddy.

Over at The New Republic, Timothy Noah, absorbing the blow-job incident, calls JFK a "monster."

What do you think?
	Noah's right, he was a monster to do those things.
	It's complex, and JFK isn't around to tell us what domination and submission games they played.
	She was an adult, she consented, and she was callous toward Jackie (and her coworkers).
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: "The rubber swan is mine" is a punchline from Vaughn Meader's "The First Family" album — a big hit comedy record at the time — in a segment in which Meader as JFK explains whose bath toys are whose. (Thanks to Hagar in the comments for the tip.) (I note that "schwanz" is slang for penis, so I wonder if Meader was in on the joke of JFK with his toys in the bath.)

"Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?"

That's Chris Van Hollen, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, meaning to help Coakley win Teddy Kennedy's seat, and running right off the road into a ditch called Chappaquiddick.

Senator Kirk.

Replacing Senator Kennedy.

... Mr. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and his sons, Edward M. Kennedy Jr. and Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, had urged Mr. Patrick to appoint Mr. Kirk, who worked for Senator Kennedy in the 1970s, and later served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee....

Mr. Kirk, 71, is chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. Several friends and associates described him as low-key and laconic, a shrewd political strategist who could have run for office himself but decided he preferred a behind-the-scenes role.

Film critic writes a book about snark — called (duh!) "Snark" — and there's nothing to do about it, except...

... snark.

First [David Denby] references one of [Wonkette's] male associate editor’s posts about Chelsea Clinton and suggests that the “young women” who wrote it must have some catty jealousy issues, with their vaginas. Then he writes that we made fun of Ted Kennedy on the day of his brain tumor surgery, citing a post about something else entirely that was written seven months before Kennedy even got cancer. Damn those bloggers, always trying to ruin other peoples’ reputations with false information!

Snort.

"Why Women Continued to Support Ted Kennedy."

By Eleanor Clift.

Organized women's groups overlooked a lot to stand by the senator from Massachusetts. Feminists who proclaimed "The personal is the political" made an exception for Kennedy.

And for Clinton. Face it. Liberal politics always came first for the so-called women's groups, which is why they are not really women's groups at all.

Did you watch the Teddy Kennedy funeral?

I happened to catch a few minutes of raw feed on C-SPAN showing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver standing around in one of the lulls. But I find it hard to imagine many people watching this long, drawn-out event and think it was pretty weird that there was so much TV coverage. I'll stick to the written word.

Here's the AP:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest alongside slain brothers John and Robert on hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday evening, celebrated for "the dream he kept alive" across the decades since their deaths.

Did they fact check that the ground is holy? At least they put "the dream he kept alive" in quotes and don't assert that he kept a dream alive, whatever that means. (Cue the comments about how he didn't keep Mary Jo Kopechne alive.)

In life, the senator had visited the burial ground often to mourn his brothers, John and Robert, killed in their 40s, more than a generation ago, by assassins' bullets.

"He was given a gift of time that his brothers were not. And he used that time to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," Obama said in a eulogy that also gently made mention of Kennedy's "personal failings and setbacks."

As a member of the Senate, Kennedy was a "veritable force of nature," the president said. But more than that, the "baby of the family who became its patriarch, the restless dreamer who became its rock."

Those left behind to mourn "grieve his passing with the memories he gave, the good he did, the dream he kept alive" Obama said inside the packed church.

It sounds like Obama gave a good speech. Must I read the whole text? I'm not going to watch the video. As I've said, I'm sticking to the written word on this one. The only thing that makes sense of all this attention to the old man's death is that it takes us back to the 2 assassinations, long ago, events that commanded long, drawn-out attention.

Today, Google redoes its logo to celebrate...

... no, not Teddy Kennedy — how would you do that? — Michael Jackson!



It's his birthday, you know.

He was murdered.

Teddy wasn't murdered. Teddy Kennedy died of cancer at the age of 77.